


People of Walmart

by OldToadWoman



Category: The 4400
Genre: Angst, F/M, Humor, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 14:57:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/749814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldToadWoman/pseuds/OldToadWoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diana Skouris was having trouble sleeping even before the naked man teleported into her bedroom without warning. (A bit of a misleading summary. No sex, sorry.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	People of Walmart

**Author's Note:**

> timeline: shortly after the end of the series (series ended in 2007)

Diana Skouris was having trouble sleeping even before the naked man teleported into her bedroom without warning.

She had too many thoughts racing in her head. The world had become a very complicated place and _now_ was a very complicated time. Knowing that the future held even more chaotic possibilities only made it worse.

When Promicin had first been discovered, the choice it posed for the general populace was mind-boggling. Take a drug. Just one dose. Fifty-fifty chance. Super power or death. No do-overs.

What would you do?

The majority of the public, thankfully, steered clear. They didn't need the authorities declaring Promicin illegal. Fifty-fifty chance at death? No, thank you. But there were others, those on the fringes--the homeless, the ill, the miserable, the wildly reckless, too many teenagers, and tragically even a few children--people who couldn't see that they had anything to lose. Fifty-fifty chance at a super power? Yes, please.

Diana's own sister April had been one of the first to take the shot. Dear, reckless April wound up on the lucky side of fifty-fifty. Her ability wasn't half bad either; she could force people to tell her the truth. Awkward at times, but better than many had fared. That was the part that drove Diana mad with frustration. If only more people understood that your chances of a favorable outcome from Promicin were far _worse_ than fifty-fifty, because even if you survived there was no guarantee that the ability you developed would be one you wanted or one that was particularly useful or even pleasant.

Some of them were downright awful. There was that woman whose hands broke out in boils any time she got upset, causing anyone near her to suddenly die. Or that man whose bodily secretions sped up people's metabolisms so much that they starved to death no matter how much they ate. Diana had been working with the 4400 since day one and she'd seen some pretty messy stuff.

The forty-four hundred. The original P-positives. Four thousand four hundred people--though no one ever said the comma that way--taken by scientists from the future, juiced with Promicin, and returned with unique abilities. Entirely unique abilities. There had been no repeats, no exact duplicates, in all of their records. At least not so far. With so many new P-positives, that might change. There had already been a few overlapping talents. There were at least two new healers that she was aware of, though neither's ability worked exactly the same as Shawn Farrell's. One could control the growth of cancer, for both good and ill. The other could rid a body of all toxins and infections.

Diana believed that the scientists from the future had targeted the 4400 knowing which abilities they would manifest and had chosen them accordingly. It was anybody's guess why they had chosen some people who would manifest unpleasant abilities, but Diana's pet theory was still that future knowledge prompted them to risk short-term damage for long-term gain. It was the classic philosophy question come to life; if you could go back in time and kill Hitler's great-great-grandfather, would you? But with Promicin spreading through the population non-selectively, wasn't it likely that they'd see even more of the unpleasant cases? And without even the consolation that it might be for the best in the long run.

The worst of those negative abilities in terms of deaths-to-date was poor Danny Farrell. And Danny had even played it safe. He'd waited until Dr. Kevin Burkhoff was able to predict who would live and who would die--with a certain unfortunate margin for error--and took the shot believing he would live. And he did. For awhile.

But Danny Farrell's ability was to _produce_ Promicin and moreover his ability produced a mutated _contagious_ form of the drug. His own mother had been the first to die, followed quickly by thousands. Promicin was no longer a drug; it was an airborne, contagious disease. Attempts to suppress his ability only caused Promicin to build up to toxic and ultimately fatal levels in his own body, and tragically didn't stop the sudden epidemic.

There was no cure, but there was a way to inoculate yourself. Diana herself was immune to Promicin--perhaps permanently, perhaps not--thanks to Dr. Burkhoff's slightly questionable experimental methods. There was still no consensus on whether the over-the-counter form of Ubiquinone that was available to the public would produce permanent immunity or if you needed to keep taking regular doses.

And that was the fly in the ointment. There were idiots out there warning people to not inoculate themselves because if the inoculation was permanent they'd forever lose their chance at a special ability if a safe way could be found later. It made Diana so angry her teeth hurt. Thousands, potentially millions, of people dying needlessly because a couple of jerks had Superman fantasies.

In the midst of one of their many debates at NTAC, Marco had forwarded Diana an article about the alleged link between autism and vaccinations. Marco had found some kind of wry humor in debunking the idiocy and "facts" in the article. It just made Diana angry, because it was _exactly_ the same kind of thinking that they were fighting now. Just the other day, she'd heard a radio call-in show debating the safety of Ubiquinone tablets. "Why are they telling us to take them regularly? If only one dose of Promicin causes abilities, why do we have to take more than one dose of Ubiquinone? That doesn't sound right to me. How do I know it isn't dangerous?" _Ah, the eternal wisdom of radio call-in shows where everyone can share an opinion regardless of their grasp on the facts or even reality._

Ubiquinone was an over-the-counter supplement being sold for daily use long before anyone had heard of Promicin. No one seemed to worry about whether it was safe when it was called _Maxxinator 5000_ and marketed as a stamina booster. No one even seemed to care that it didn't work or even that it was never entirely clear what it was supposed to do in the first place. The original label had a shirtless stud and a lot of vague marketing doublespeak about power and energy. Was it supposed to make you feel younger? Stronger? Leaner? More alert? Was it for athletes or bodybuilders who wanted to build muscle? Or dieters who wanted to lose mass? Or truck drivers or students who wanted to stay awake on too few hours of sleep? Or was it some kind of sexual aid? No one cared and people bought it anyway, imagining the product did whatever they hoped it did, which was probably to make them magically look like the guy on the package. Only now that it turned out that Ubiquinone could _prevent half the human population from dying_ of Promicin exposure did anyone stop to question whether it was safe.

 _Everyone_ needed to take Ubiquinone and they needed to take it _now_. Seattle was under quarantine and the supplement had been distributed throughout the area. In theory, it should be under control. Yet there were surpluses that could only be accounted for if some people weren't taking the drug as recommended. From scattered news reports, Diana surmised that outside the quarantine zone things were even more lax. Everyone seemed to be taking it for granted that the danger ended when Danny's death stopped the source. She had worked for the CDC long enough before joining NTAC to know that contagions were rarely so easily contained. People worldwide needed to take the situation more seriously.

Before, the decision to take Promicin required an active step. Now, the decision to _protect_ yourself from Promicin required the effort. The outcome no longer favored the indecisive.

And then of course there was, as always, Jordan Collier, promoting Promicin like a religion.

"It's the future," Jordan always said.

 _The future can kiss my cute little butt_ , Diana thought to herself.

As of his last email, Ben hadn't mentioned whether he was taking the supplement yet. She tried to tell herself that Europe was a long way away, but it did no good. There _had_ been small outbreaks in Europe, though mainly confined to airports so far. She was angry with him. Had he merely been inconsiderate in responding to her email that way, or was there something between the lines? She'd asked a very direct question about something she was very worried about and all he'd said was, "Glad you're okay. Things are crazy now. Busy. I'll write again when I have more time." So, was he just being an uncommunicative _guy_? Or was he deliberately obfuscating? Had he inoculated himself against the danger? Was he already dead? Or shooting laser beams out of his ass?

And had he already answered her question days ago and she just had no way to find out? The Internet connection was out, again, had been for almost two weeks, along with the phones. Well, not quite. A brief reconnection had been made a few days ago, but Diana had been working on an assignment at the time and didn't hear about it until two hours after it had gone down again.

The quarantine had become more than a quarantine. It was starting to feel like something more ominous, part leper colony, part ghetto, increasing overtones of internment camp, with a frightening hint of "behind enemy lines". Despite official declarations of concern for their safety, it had become a strange contest between the outside and the inside. The federal government would shut down the power and a few days later a P-positive would turn up who could generate electricity. Water. Supplies. It went round and round with the Internet just the latest pissing match and Diana had no doubt that her side would win this one soon enough. Until then, it was very annoying.

 _Our side_. It was weird for her to think of Collier and the 4400 and the new P-positives as "us" but, like it or not, Diana-the-immune was on the inside of the quarantine line, literally and, when it came down to it, even in terms of loyalty. Her daughter was an original 4400 and most of her surviving friends were now P-positives. That almost certainly included Tom Baldwin, but he was being very tight-lipped about the whole thing.

Tom was a dick, too. She hated Tom and she hated Ben and she hated Jordan. She'd been trying to read a book to distract herself and relax enough to finally sleep, but she tossed it aside in frustration because all the men in the story were also dicks.

That's precisely when Marco Pacella teleported into her bedroom wearing nothing but his glasses and a towel. The towel, as it happened, was draped around his shoulders and he was in an awkward squat, knees wide, leaving Diana with a full view of everything there was to get a view of before Marco screamed and grabbed the blanket off her bed. Diana screamed too out of reflex, but Marco screamed louder and longer and she was already giggling by the time he stopped screaming. Maia ran into the room with a baseball bat, saw Marco--though thankfully not _all_ of Marco by that point--grunted, rolled her eyes, and stalked back out of the room without a word. Apparently Marco was not on Maia's list of intruders that Mommy needed protecting from.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." They both said it. Repeatedly. He, apologizing for his naked teleportation. She, apologizing for her inability to stop laughing at it.

It was not Marco's fault that he was P-positive. He had contracted it early before anyone knew about Ubiquinone. He didn't ask for a super power and Diana really shouldn't laugh at his inability to control it.

"I thought," Diana said when she'd gotten her breath back, "that you had to concentrate to teleport somewhere."

"Concentrate, yes," Marco said from the floor where he was huddled out of sight, "but not actually concentrate-on-purpose."

"How do you concentrate-on-accident?"

"Fairly easily actually," Marco said, hesitantly poking his head back up. His hair wasn't quite damp, but had the look of not having been combed and with a shower in the very recent past. That would explain the towel and the nudity, but not, Diana felt, the accidentally concentrating on teleporting into her bedroom. She wasn't, now that she thought about it, entirely sure she wanted an explanation, but couldn't help herself from asking anyway. She patted the bed reassuringly next to her. She was in pajamas of a suitably modest design and Marco was now wrapped in a blanket like a caterpillar in a cocoon so there didn't seem to be a need to stand on ceremony.

"Come on," she said, patting the bed again. "Sit. Tell me what happened."

Marco climbed up on the bed. "Um, well, I just took a shower."

"Uh-huh." Diana tried to be encouraging and didn't point out that his hair had already dried.

"And then I sat down at the computer to check if the Internet was back up."

"You use your computer naked?" Diana asked and then wished she hadn't. Marco was a guy. Guy plus computer plus naked equaled awkward and, even without the Internet, he probably had a few things stored on his hard drive that she didn't want to know about.

"Just drip-drying before bed," he said and added defensively, "There was another towel on the chair."

"It's okay. I don't need a visual."

"And there was a signal--"

Marco's explanation was cut short as Diana scrambled to her own computer. It took a lifetime to power on and her heart jumped at the little icon in the corner showing an Internet connection. Several minutes of tapping and clicking and cursing did nothing to bring up her email though.

"Yeah, that's the same thing I got." Marco leaned in to look at her computer screen and the blanket slipped off his shoulder without him even noticing and, yeah, Diana could easily imagine him getting so distracted by a computer problem that he wouldn't even remember he was still naked. Marco was really adorable at times and the idea flitted across her mind that she never should have broken up with him. Of all the guys she knew, he was officially the least dickish. "There's something out there. Just enough of a signal to ping, but not strong enough to transmit data and it's very intermittent."

Diana finally grunted and gave up. The false hope of communicating with the outside world only made her bad mood worse. "Okay, so, you sat down at your computer for some naked network troubleshooting and--?"

"Oh." Marco clearly thought he'd gotten safely beyond that part of the conversation. "Um. So. Uh. After I gave up on the connection, I closed all my programs and then I guess I was kind of just staring off into space. You know. And then I was here."

"Sitting naked and staring into space made you think of my bedroom?"

"No! No. It doesn't work like that anyway. I have to concentrate on a photograph of a place to travel there. It's a visual thing. Even attempting to mentally visualize a target location doesn't work. I've done some real-time brain scan experiments that suggest my visual cortex actually plays a pivotal role in my ability. Of course, I always end up teleporting out of the scanner so we only have scans of the beginning of the process, but still, it's fascinating."

His attempt to change the subject was quite well done, but Diana was having none of it. "So, you have a picture of my bedroom?"

"No! I mean, well, obviously, yes, but I had no idea it was your bedroom. It was just a picture that Maia sent me. Of you. You know, holding the fluffy panda?"

Diana remembered the fluffy panda picture now that he mentioned it. Maia had taken it and Diana had no objections to her emailing it to friends. She'd been holding one of Maia's stuffed toys and sitting on the edge of her bed. It was, she had to admit, a fairly cute picture. And, yes, when she thought about it, that must have been back when she and Marco had briefly dated, which would explain why Maia sent it to him. One question remained. "Why were you concentrating on the fluffy panda picture?"

"I wasn't! I mean, not on purpose. It's just that I closed all my programs and it was just there and I guess my mind wandered a bit."

"It was just there?"

"It's, um." Marco's gaze shifted to the blanket where he nervously fiddled with a loose thread. "It's my desktop wallpaper."

"Aw." Well, that was sweet. And also pathetic. She and Marco had broken up over a year ago? Two years? But mainly it was sweet. And Ben sure as hell wasn't earning any sweet points right now.

"Diana, I hate to ask this. As in, actually hate to ask this--but do you have any men's clothes that I could borrow?"

Poor Marco. If the answer had been yes, then it would have been Ben's clothes she would be loaning him and that had to be hard on a guy's ego. As it was, she no longer had any of Ben's clothes. She wasn't really sure if she and Ben were even a couple anymore (even if he was alive and not shooting laser beams out of his ass). Hence, the clothes she was instead going to be loaning Marco were going to be even harder on his ego.

In the end, she was able to find a pair of black yoga pants with a lot of stretch in them and a baggy T-shirt with Hello Kitty on it. It almost worked, if he kept his arms at his sides and tugged the shirt down a lot. In that case only the very bottom of his butt hung out. If, on the other hand, he moved at all, the shirt rode up in both front and back and, well, it was still perfectly fine--if he were cast in a production of Swan Lake for instance, though not perhaps for walking down the street without getting arrested. The yoga pants were _very_ clingy when stretched that tight.

"Diana, I can't go outside dressed like this. I can't go _anywhere_ dressed like this."

"I don't know. I think there are a few nightclubs on Pike Street where you would be _very_ popular."

"Please. I'd get laughed out of all the nightclubs on Pike dressed like this. The only place I'm fit for is Walmart."

"Walmart! There's an idea." Diana went out into the living room and Marco followed. Maia popped out of her room, causing a lot of frantic shirt tugging from Marco. Maia giggled.

"Mom, seriously? What. On. Earth?"

"Marco is experiencing a slight wardrobe malfunction. Go back to bed. It's the middle of the night. Ah, here we go." Diana pulled a sales flier out of a stack of junk mail. She unfolded it to show Marco the big photograph of the inside of a Walmart store. Across the top of the photo, the text read: "Open 24 Hours. We Have Stock. Quarantine Sale!" Thus far, in Diana's experience, "Quarantine Sale" meant a significant increase in prices, but it was hard to argue with supply and demand.

Marco wrinkled his nose. "I wonder what quality the image needs to be. Maybe I could get a tattoo of home on my arm as an emergency re-set button."

"You can carry things with you, right?"

"Yeah, whatever I have in my hand goes with me. And if I'd been wearing pants at the time, I have a photo of NTAC headquarters in my wallet specifically for emergencies. I just hadn't anticipated teleporting sans pants."

"Can you carry _people_ with you?"

"I've never tried. I'm not what you call a heavy-lifter."

"I have an idea." Diana tapped on Maia's door and told her that she and Marco might be going out for a bit. Then she went to her own room and returned with a pair of sandals that she dropped on the floor at Marco's feet.

"You've got to be kidding me."

"No shirt. No shoes. No service." With a smile, she added, "Just stick your toes in them. That will be good enough."

Marco did as instructed. His heels hung off the end of the sandals. His shirt was riding up again for that matter. Also, the poor guy looked chilly. Diana smiled and excused herself to go get dressed.

"Put on something tacky!" Marco called after her. "If you're coming to Walmart with me, I don't want you making me look bad by wearing one of your snazzy professional outfits. I wanna see some stripes with plaids, woman."

Diana returned to the living room in khaki pants and a plaid shirt unbuttoned to reveal a Pooh Bear T-shirt. "How's this? Am I ready for Walmart?"

"No," Marco said with a wistful grin. "On you, it just looks like ironic hipster."

"Is that a compliment or an insult?"

"Compliment. Definitely a compliment. You're like one of those runway models who can make burlap look fashionable."

Diana felt herself blushing. _Really, Diana_ , she asked herself, _why did you break up with this guy?_ "Okay, first things first. If this doesn't work, make sure you hold onto this." She handed him a twenty dollar bill. "Buy yourself some pants and take the bus home."

She checked the photos in her wallet to make sure they had a shortcut home. She then slung her purse over her shoulders, picked the Walmart flier back up, and very gingerly stepped onto Marco's toes. He slipped his arms around her nervously and his eyes darted everywhere but at her, which was tricky as their faces were just inches apart. "Ready?" she asked. Marco nodded and then stared with a comical intensity at the Walmart flier.

Nothing happened for several moments and Diana fought back the urge to tell him that he was trying too hard. _Next, you'll be telling him it happens to everybody._ And then suddenly there was a blinding pain in her eyes. She literally couldn't see and she tucked her head into Marco's shoulder to shield herself from whatever it was. She found herself involuntarily thinking of _Star Trek_ and transporter accidents and a Stephen King short story she'd read once. In the King story, physical teleportation was instantaneous, but the subjective awareness of the time that passed between points was so unfathomably long that sentient creatures came out the other side hopelessly insane. Was that what this was? The void between realities? "What is it?" she murmured into Marco's shoulder.

"Fluorescent lights," Marco said calmly. "Worse than bright sunlight. You'll get used to it in a minute."

Diana opened one eye. They were standing in the middle of Walmart. A woman a few feet away was giving them a disapproving scowl. _Yeah, that's right. I'm snuggling my boyfriend in the middle of Walmart. **You** are wearing white capri pants after Labor Day. So there._ She laughed, but couldn't bring herself to explain why.

"Diana, may I borrow your purse?" That would be pretty close to the top of the list of things guys never say when shopping, so Diana had to ask him to repeat it to be sure she heard right. "It's just that, even by Walmart standards, I'm about to get arrested."

"Sorry." This night just kept getting more embarrassing and nearly everything made her want to giggle at this point. She transferred her purse to Marco as discreetly as possible, with possibly only the woman in the white capri pants spying any indecency. It wasn't a particularly large purse, but it had a long strap and Marco was able to adjust it to shield himself from view. Diana giggled again and apologized again and then did her best to keep her mouth shut because the apologizing seemed to embarrass him as much as the giggling. "Come on. Let's get you something to wear."

They each started grabbing hangers of clothing, any clothing, so Marco had something besides Diana's purse to hold in front of him and Diana followed behind to block the rear view, not that Marco didn't have a lovely rear view. _Dear Lord, woman, what is wrong with you?_ They seemed to be in the plus size women's department and Marco tried to figure out which way the men's department was, while Diana tried to work out the math and finally decided that she had to be ovulating or else she couldn't possibly be thinking the things she was thinking about Marco. They broke up because she _didn't_ find him attractive. Sweet and funny and smart and respectful and kind to children and all the other things you looked for in a mate, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, hot. Except tonight he was. Also, she wanted to kill Ben. _Yup, definitely ovulating._

They finally found the men's department and they quickly found a pair of pants, for a reasonable price even, not the inflated "Quarantine Sale" prices that Diana had feared. They also found a cheap pair of shoes, but a shirt was beyond Diana's available cash reserves. Credit card sales in the quarantine zone were grounded along with the phone and Internet service. Marco resigned himself to wearing the Hello Kitty shirt home and wondered out loud if it wouldn't look quite so bad if he turned it inside out.

But as they approached the checkout, Diana witnessed something that should have been accompanied by a chorus of angels. People were swiping cards through the machines at the registers. Diana pushed her way past a line to ask the clerk if it could really be true. "The credit card machines are working?!"

The clerk barely glanced at her. "Obviously, ma'am."

So they went back and Marco got a shirt and Diana filled a shopping cart with toilet paper and canned goods and boxes of macaroni. Vowing to pay her back, Marco picked up some computer gizmos that she didn't really pay attention to, but he seemed to think they'd come in handy. Extra batteries. Extra flashlights. Diana even doubled back to the camping department for additional supplies, because, really the future was very uncertain and you never knew when some extra survival gear might come in handy. The Walmart was surprisingly well-stocked considering the circumstances. There had to be a P-positive with powers she hadn't seen yet to get this much contraband by the feds. (At this point, _all_ goods flowing into the Seattle area were considered contraband other than a few emergency medical drops and even those were more and more often just shipments of more Ubiquinone, the only supply that they now had in abundance.)

As a random stroke of luck, Diana found a tiny photo album on a keychain just big enough to hold wallet-size photos. It was a girly thing with hearts and kittens, but, after digging through the bins, she found one that was blue with flowers, still girly, but at least not pink.

"Wear this on a lanyard around your neck at all times. Fill it with photos of places you need to go and you'll be all set."

"Thanks." Marco smiled at her sheepishly. She felt a pang of guilt. He was reading too much into the gift. It wasn't even that practical; it would be less bulky to just tape one or two photos of safe spots to the back of his I.D. badge. 

"I just wouldn't want you to get stranded anywhere, well, anywhere _more_ awkward than Walmart in a Hello Kitty shirt."

Marco glanced down self-consciously. He was clutching a sweater on a hanger like a shield in front of himself, but he seemed completely unaware of how exposed he was in back. Three college-aged girls had been following them none-too-discretely and giggling since the electronics department. At one point, a cell phone was aimed in their direction and Diana covered her face just before the telltale click. _Maybe it's a good thing there's no Internet connection today_ , Diana thought briefly. Marco hadn't seemed to notice and she saw no point worrying him with it. It was just _possible_ they weren't destined for a web site, so maybe he would never need to know.

The cart was overflowing by the time they decided they were ready to check out and a small part of Diana's brain made a mental note to never go shopping in the middle of the night again. She was nearly giddy. Sleep deprivation and 3AM shopping trips were not how responsible budgets were maintained. In hindsight, she blamed the sleep deprivation for not spotting the problem earlier. It likely wouldn't have made much difference as to the actual outcome, but she would have felt less guilty about it if she hadn't _enjoyed_ the time they had spent wandering the Walmart and killing people.

With that perfect hindsight, she would over and over again tick off all the things that she should have noticed, but didn't. The store was fully stocked despite the quarantine and fully staffed despite ten thousand recent sudden deaths in the city. The credit card machines worked and the clerk thought it odd that she'd even asked. And the woman who bagged their purchases drawled, "You two want your stuff in separate sacks?" and that was only a tiny clue, but a clue nonetheless.

But Diana didn't actually spot anything wrong until they stepped into the humid air outside when she could not see the bus stop that she was sure should be on the corner out front.

"There should be a bus stop right there."

"We're not going to be able to carry all of this on the bus," Marco said, clearly not understanding the problem. "We can try flagging down a cab, but it's probably easier to just let me teleport everything back to your place a few bags at a time."

Diana nodded mutely, but then shook her head.

"This is all wrong, Marco. There's supposed to be a bus stop right there. And a Starbucks over there. And it was almost chilly tonight. Just a few hours ago, it was chilly."

"Oh, God." Marco's jaw hung slack as he realized what she had already realized. "Oh, God. It was a stock photo. The ad was for the local Walmart but they used a stock photo of a store outside the quarantine zone."

Diana pulled out her cellphone. Her heart cartwheeled when she confirmed she had a signal, a leap for outside contact at last, a drop for the horror of what that really meant. It took all her mental fortitude to follow protocol and call the CDC before she stopped to check her personal messages.When she finally did, the email from Ben was there, the email that for the third straight time ignored her question, the email that told her he was sorry that they'd grown apart, the email that said he was ready to move on with someone else and hoped the same for her. "Son of a bitch!" She wanted to throw the phone on the ground and stomp on it, but Diana Skouris was too practical to throw a childish tantrum no matter how much she deserved one.

"I'm sorry?" Marco was unable to keep the question mark out of the condolences. Because he couldn't really be sorry about her boyfriend, not on a night like this when a hundred other more important things had gone wrong, and he likely wouldn't have been upset that she'd just gotten dumped anyway, and he had no way of knowing that what she was pissed off about wasn't what Ben had said (though she'd find time to be pissed off about that later); it was what he _hadn't_ said, the question he'd declined to answer.

"We have to get out of here," she said. "The local police will be on site before the CDC and they won't understand that bringing us in will just make it worse. I'm sorry; we shouldn't have gotten so much stuff. I was counting on being able to make multiple trips, but if you can only target the inside of the store with the photograph, we can't risk a return trip. Anything that gets left behind has to stay."

They rearranged their things so that the items they wanted most were in bags that they could hold onto and the things they deemed of lower priority stayed in the cart that they hoped they could drag along even if Marco couldn't lift it. Marco slipped his left foot under one of the wheels, which meant Diana had to put all of her weight on his right. Diana then flipped through the photos in her wallet and showed him one of Maia with giant industrial pipes looming behind her.

"That's not the panda picture," Marco said.

"I don't care. It's inside the quarantine zone. Just take us there. Now, Marco, now." She slipped the open wallet halfway into her top pocket to free her hand to grab another bag. "Can you still see it?" Marco nodded and stared solemnly at her chest and Diana was not even tempted to giggle at all. The sounds of sirens grew near and were instantly replaced with the sounds of crickets chirping.

"Why here?" Marco asked. "We could have gone straight home."

Diana collapsed onto the grass of Gas Works Park. "Because I need to have a hissy fit where my daughter can't hear me." She leaned back and yelled up at the night, "Fuck!" As hissy fits went, it was lacking a little something. She sulkily plucked a strand of grass and stared at it. She could see no difference in it, but she understood that the park was somehow cleaner now, purged of all lingering traces of industrial waste by one of Jordan Collier's followers in one of his well-publicized grand gestures.

Marco sat down next to her in the grass. "I'm so sorry. God, I'm so sorry."

"It wasn't your fault." The person she was angriest at now was Jordan Collier. He was the only one with the ability to nullify Promicin and instead of using that ability to save lives he was trapped in a Messiah complex. The only time good old J.C. used his ability was to take away the power of someone he found inconvenient.

"It was my ability that teleported us outside the quarantine zone." Marco seemed calm, but then Marco always seemed calm and he was probably still in shock. She could hear the traces of guilt building though.

"And it was my idea to teleport to a picture in an advertising flier," she reminded him. She felt like she was about to cry and she was _not_ going to cry.

"Okay, fine, we both screwed up. We're officially idiots. Happy?" He put his arm around her shoulder in what he clearly intended to be a reassuring gesture, but she could feel him shiver.

Diana snorted. It was a laugh and a sob and a growl all at once. She wanted, she still _desperately_ wanted that tantrum that she felt she deserved, but Diana Skouris was a responsible grown-up and, as such, half her brain was already composing the report she was going to have to write in the morning.

Marco said nothing. He was staring at the harbor with a strange expression on his face.

She glanced over at the shopping cart, which had indeed made the journey successfully. She wanted to kick it. They hadn't caused the contagion, but there was a certain irony in their contributing in at least some small way to the spreading outbreak that Diana herself had been trying to warn the world of. She had so many regrets, not the least of which was having gone at all, but she also wished that she'd happened to check the supplement aisle. Was Ubiquinone in stock? Was it flying off the shelves? Or sitting there gathering dust?

When Ubiquinone had first been discovered, the choice it posed for the general populace was mind-boggling. Take a drug. Was one dose enough? Or don't take the drug and wait for inevitable Promicin exposure. Fifty-fifty chance. Super power or death.

What had the people of Walmart chosen?

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this ages and ages ago and didn't intend to post it until I had another story to post along side it. The two stories don't go together, don't even take place in the same universe, but I wanted to post them at the same time so that I'd have one upbeat story and one dark story each going off on a different _what-if_ tangent from the end of the series. And this one isn't even the one that I think is "correct". My personal take on it is that the contagion ended with Danny's death and things returned to "normal" just with more people--including several regular characters--having new powers. And that's what the other story was going to be (everyone trying to adapt to the new normal) ... but ... it just got very long and muddled in my head and I'm no closer to finishing that story than I was a year ago, so I decided to just post this one without an upbeat counterpoint story.
> 
> This story was not written for a formal prompt, but was written as a personal challenge after a friend complained about a lack of female characters in primary roles in fan fiction. I fear I may not have done Diana justice, but I hope I at least succeeded in making her more than a plot-device.


End file.
